ORANGEVILLE — American Legion baseball, for some, is a way for high school and first-year college players to build their skills over the summer.

“It started as a desire to get our Orangeville baseball players a higher level of competition and more experience,” Orangeville Legion coach Bill Meier said, “and hopefully have that carry over into some extended tournament play.”

For others, specifically those closer to the Rockford area, Legion baseball is a thing of the past.

“It’s too bad,” former Belvidere coach Ken Anderson said. “It was a great thing, but time took over and we moved on to a different stage.”

The official Legion Baseball website lists more than 50,000 teams nationwide. But those numbers aren’t coming from northwest Illinois. Currently there are just six teams in this corner of the state: Orangeville, Lena, Fulton, Ottawa, Rock Falls and Hanover. There are also a couple across the northern border in Beloit and Janesville.

Meier, who’s originally from the Chicago suburbs, remembers growing up playing legion baseball.

“There were legion teams all over the place,” he said. “We had 22 teams just in my city.

“I didn’t really understand what American Legion baseball was because we never played in the national tournament. By legion rules, each city is only permitted to enter one team into the tournament, so we had a town tournament and then it was done.”

American Legion, chartered by Congress in 1919, is a patriotic veterans organization that has become one of the most influential non-profit groups in the U.S.

Legion baseball began nearly 88 years ago.

Players up to age 19 can play. In the Rock River Valley, most programs have used legion teams to develop younger players’ skills while helping experienced athletes refine theirs.

Some programs are inclusive to all area players, such as the Lena Legion, while others are exclusively for their specific town.

Orangeville has done both throughout its eight-year history.

“The first two years in Orangeville, our team was almost exclusively Orangeville guys,” Meier said. “And for whatever reason, baseball has slowly been losing its popularity, so we had to expand and go to other places to get other kids to play. But the next few seasons, I expect there to be more Orangeville kids getting involved for us.”

Orangeville Legion has seen players from Aquin, Dakota, and this year even players from Freeport.

Lena has been one of the longest running legion teams in the area at more than 30 years. Coach Cary Schroeder has managed the team for about a decade. Lena is sponsored by Legion Post 577. But not every legion team is sponsored by its local post.

“You don’t have to be,” Orangeville’s Meier said. “It all comes down to who’s going to sponsor and fund you.

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“We have a legion, but I didn’t approach them for it. Once you get sponsored by a legion team, all decisions and documents have to go through the legion post and signed by officers.”

Being sponsored by a legion post does have its perks. Schroeder said Legion Post 577 has a raffle supported by the sons of the legion, which has helped pay off some expenses.

“It works real well for us because it finances our whole program,” he said. “We don’t charge the kids anything to play because of this raffle.

“The legion does pay our insurance and then I pay for everything else out of that raffle. I donate mileage here and there and my assistant coaches drive sometimes, but it’s not a standard 50 cents a mile or anything like that. Anything we donate is time and a vehicle.”

Meier said the Orangeville Legion, which is actually called the Orangeville Baseball Club, is self-funded.

“I do the fundraisers and there’s a player fee,” he said. “We just call ourselves the Orangeville Legion team because we play in a Legion league.”

Meier said starting a legion team is as easy as simply going to the American Legion website and filling out an application.

Dwindling numbers

Legion baseball isn’t limited to small towns, but you would get that impression when you look around the Rock River Valley, and even beyond. Rockford legion teams existed for a time, but eventually died off.

“There’s a lot of travel teams around and anyone can find one,” Anderson said. “You just have to pay the money.”

Anderson also said around the early 1990s, senior teams — Legion teams with players ages 19 and under — went away and there were only junior teams (ages 13-17) in the area.

“Most high schools weren’t too concerned about playing their junior kids,” he said. “That took your kids that graduated out of the picture.

“But most legions that sponsored you wanted you to play in legion tournaments. Well if you did, you played against kids that were 18 and 19. It was pretty tough to be representative, plus you got beat pretty bad because you had younger kids.

“I think those are the two big things that took American Legion baseball out of the area.”

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Staying committed

The difficulty of running a legion team in small towns is the numbers game. Not that there aren’t enough athletes willing to play, but that many have other commitments to other sports programs in the school.

“Most of the teams in our league are made up of small-school guys,” Meier said, “and small schools need their players to be three-sport athletes.”

Meier thinks there’s pressure that comes with playing for those programs, while also wanting to play legion during the summer.

“Coaches in various schools say ‘If you don’t play in my basketball summer league, then you aren’t going to play varsity basketball,’” Meier said. “Or ‘If you don’t do every football workout, you’re not going to start for my varsity football team.’”

Meier and Schroeder said work can also prevent some from playing certain nights, but that hasn’t been very problematic.

“I carry a big roster so that we have it covered,” Meier said.

“We allow kids to do other things as long as we can field nine players every night,” Schroeder added. “It’s worked somehow over the years.”